Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Florian Weimer
2005-12-05T14:48:18Z

* Greg KH:

> On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 03:29:54PM +0100, Jesper Juhl wrote:
>>
>> Why can't this be done by distributors/vendors?
>
> It already is done by these people, look at the "enterprise" Linux
> distributions and their 5 years of maintance (or whatever the number
> is.)
>
> If people/customers want stability, they already have this option.

It seems that vendor kernels lack most DoS-related fixes. I'm only
aware of a single vendor which tracks them to the point that CVE names
are assigned.

Vendor kernels are not a panacea, either. With some of the basic
support contracts (in the four-figure range per year and CPU), the
vendor won't look extensively at random kernel crashes which could (in
theory) be attributed to faulty hardware, *and* you don't get
community support for these heavily patched kernel collages.